PM’s Woodside snub says a lot about modern Labor
It says something about the mindset of the modern Labor Party that not a single federal Labor MP turned up at the weekend’s 70th anniversary celebration of our largest gas exporter.
Gas is our second-largest export earner, the essential feedstock for the fertiliser and chemical industries absolutely needed for modern life, and the only way to ensure that the transition to renewable energy doesn’t put the lights out, yet because it’s an “evil” fossil fuel, not a single federal Labor MP could attend this milestone, even though Woodside is one of the very biggest businesses headquartered in Perth.
The federal Resources Minister, Madeleine King, was a no-show even though she represents a Western Australian seat, has lately been saying that gas is an essential “transition” fuel, and was present at a footy match 500 metres away an hour earlier.
The Prime Minister was a no-show even though he’d been in Perth the previous day and had tried to say, albeit with innumerable caveats, that the government was not against Woodside’s massive Browse gas development that is critical to our long-term domestic gas security and the energy security of our vital economic and security partner, Japan.
And the WA Premier could not be bothered to turn up because he was attending Labor Party events in the Pilbara, even though he has his own private plane that could easily have taken him to Perth and back in a couple of hours.
So it was left to two former Coalition prime ministers, two former Coalition premiers of WA, the current WA Opposition Leader and the current WA Liberal leader – plus one lone former WA Labor premier – to mark the anniversary of a business employing almost 5000 people that last year paid to the state and commonwealth governments some $5bn in taxes, royalties and levies.
Since Woodside started operating on the North West Shelf off WA four decades back, it’s paid more than $40bn in federal royalties alone. Yet the only current Labor MP who could be bothered to turn up to this celebration of our country’s success was the WA energy and climate change minister who got a leave pass to go where no senior Labor politician can tread lest that offend the party’s green-left activists and potential Greens coalition partners.
Our country is in diabolical trouble if the party in government federally and in five of six states is unwilling to acknowledge our ongoing dependence on gas, lest that upset the climate alarmists who insist we must get to 82 per cent renewable energy within just six years and resolutely phase out the industries that are the source of our current prosperity. It’s a sign of the cloud cuckoo land in which so much contemporary political debate operates that this appalling snub to a vital industry has passed almost unnoticed.
Indeed, it says something about the diffidence of our business leadership that it’s put up with the constant denigration of the industries on which our prosperity depends and largely abdicated the moral leadership that should be the duty of anyone in charge of the industries and the tens of thousands of workers whose futures are at risk.
Like so many, they’re fearful of upsetting the climate lobby, even though nothing Australia does will make any difference to climate (assuming that mankind’s CO2 emissions really are the main climate villain), given that we’re scarcely 1 per cent of global emissions and the big emitters, China and India, have not the slightest intention of cutting their emissions any time in the next half century or so.
Australia is now close to a tipping point when it comes to our future as a First World economy.
Leaving aside export education, that’s often more an immigration racket than a genuine export industry, the way we pay our way in the world is via resources and agriculture.
Yet all of our resource exports, especially coal and gas, plus our agricultural exports, are at risk from the green fixations of the contemporary Labor Party.
Opening new coalmines and gas fields has become harder and harder over the past decade and is now almost impossible due to bureaucratic overreach, green lawfare and largely bogus Indigenous heritage claims. A sign of the current idiocy is the rush to restrict gas exports or to open gas import terminals here, as if it’s more “moral” to import gas from overseas to meet the looming domestic gas shortfall than to develop more of the local gas fields that we have here in abundance.
Then there’s looming changes to environmental protection and biodiversity laws that could soon strangle all developments, even residential property, in yet more green tape. And the federal government’s proposed “nature positive” laws that will effectively impose green taxes on almost every economic activity.
It’s no surprise that cost of living is soaring up, not down. Just lately there’s been some incipient realism from former green zealots and tentative pushback from people who have been too quiet for too long.
“Twiggy” Forrest has conceded that “green” hydrogen at scale is a pipedream. The former proponents of building solar panels on the old Liddell coal-fired power plant site have admitted defeat, notwithstanding a billion-dollar government subsidy.
Glencore has decided it’s not going to withdraw from coal production after all. The energy market operator is warning of blackouts without more gas urgently coming into the system and the NSW Labor government has joined its Victorian counterpart in subsidising coal-fired power plants and hoping that no one notices.
Still, led by the hyperventilating Climate Change Minister, the federal government insists we can do what no other country is even attempting, namely run a modern industrial economy almost entirely on intermittent power even though that demands electricity 24/7, not just when the sun shines and the wind blows. If, and it’s a massive if, this is to be remotely feasible, it’s entirely dependent on the ready availability of gas that can power up the system whenever the wind drops or the sun disappears.
Yet the engineering Luddites and political breeze-testers currently in charge couldn’t even be bothered politely to acknowledge a 70-year-old Australian success story for fear of transgressing against the climate cult. Perhaps this obvious failure of simple courtesy might finally alert us to our folly.
Tony Abbott was one of the two former Coalition PMs at Woodside’s 70th anniversary dinner in Perth on Saturday night.
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